A Long Hard Road Out of Suck

As first Published at www.hockeyinsight.com

With the Tuesday’s overtime loss against the Lightning, the Leafs have declared their residence in an upper level of purgatory, where four consecutive overtime losses represent the slow climb from running joke to bona fide hockey club. As bizarre a trend as it is, it does mean Toronto has been an over five hundred team in the last five games, and while that’s not quite worthy of a round of high fives, it’s something and something is unequivocally better than nothing.

It means that in four games, if the Leafs can snap out of letting in the first goal, they win. It means if they can sharpen up their late night four on four, they win. It means if something on the bench clicks and they can do one better shift of offense or defense, they win. That may be a lot of “ifs” but the biggest one yet is Kessel. He played well and managed to get himself open enough for a bunch of shots, none of which looked too convincing but judging from last year’s highlight reel if he gets any part of his groove back they’ll be turning into bullets and real productivity.

As of this writing the season is creeping up on a quarter finished and the Buds are sharing last place with the Hurricanes, which though hardly enviable is only seven points out of a place in the postseason. While there’s nobody out there writing off the latter, just about everybody assumes the former are set to make their customary early exit come April 10th.

The case has been made that the new team is being built from the ground up, and will without doubt be a while finding their feet. As they’ve immediately established, should it actually occur, the nature of the Maple Leaf turnaround is going to be slow. The best anybody can hope for at this point is that it’s steady. Of course an eighty game season is an awfully long time, and word has it those in the employ of MLSE, along with the Flames, have jumped the line for those special H1N1 meds all the rest of the suckers are going to have to wait for. If any of the other teams in the league are dumb enough to behave like gentlemen and actually wait their turn behind infants, asthmatics and pregnant ladies, a nice fat bout of swine flu could throw more than a few games their way (Please excuse a digression the writer thinks he should be permitted as he just had his children vaccinated).

So what happens next? Friday has Toronto up against the aforementioned Carolina team full of long-established talent and a Cup in recent memory that has so far Staal-ed (ahhhhh) out of the gate. Friday means the same thing for both teams. A team in last place that means to rise above has to win games like these, to put itself on the proper trajectory by stepping on the heads of the real losers. Whatever the outcome, expect a game with playoff intensity, more than a little rough housing and enough dirty to make late-nineties Christina Aguilera go three shades pink. In short, a proper hockey game.

If the Leafs come out on top it would make 6 games with a point, a notch up in the standings and the biggest momentum push of the season, which is a fancy way of saying nothing much. A loss means just about the same, but those two points have to come from somewhere and it doesn’t look like it’ll be any easier with the Wings, the Hawks and the freshly inoculated Flames all on the immediate horizon.

So the recipe for success is…The Monster stays good or better, Kessel makes friends with the back of the net, the young guys skate fast, the tough guys get tough and the Southern partisan crowd keeps daydreaming about NASCAR. Sounds simple right? Right? Right.

As a postscript, all this stuff about baby steps aside, would it have really killed them to beat the Habs in the Waldo jerseys? Would it have been that hard? No one deserves two points dressed like that.